Asbury University chapel had Médine (Craig’s wife, who is from Africa) speak about ethnic reconciliation, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. The podcast may be heard at the following address:
http://www.asbury.edu/podcasts/21086
Category Archives: Current issues
Video of Médine’s war testimony at Asbury Seminary chapel
Médine shares what she experienced as a war refugee in her nation of Congo before our marriage.
Her message starts around 18 minutes at the following link:
http://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatschapelservices/430/
It takes several minutes to download the mp4 version.
Is it bigoted to call Christianity true?
It has become fashionable in some circles recently to publicly disdain Christian claims as “bigoted.” For Christians to believe that Jesus is the world’s only true savior and lord, or to believe that their faith is uniquely true, is held to be disrespectful to other beliefs. What is most ironic about this charge is that those who call such historic Christian beliefs bigoted are themselves making a truth claim disrespectful to other beliefs.
Before exploring this point further, it is important to recognize that people can indeed hold truth claims, including about Christianity, in uncharitable and even bigoted ways. Many people, for example, adopt wholesale a system of beliefs that are hurtful to others and not necessary to the faith they claim. Many Hindus traditionally approved of sati, burning a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, even though the Hindu Scriptures did not require this. Many Christians in the United States have perpetuated particular unjust racial or other prejudices as part of a subculture that also claimed to be Christian, without distinguishing genuinely biblical from other elements of their heritage.
Moreover, it is possible to hold even essential elements of one’s faith in an intolerantly narrow way that one’s own faith would condemn. Christians who truly believe we are saved by grace share joyfully with others good news of hope. Some, however, have used their faith to boast in their own superiority, forgetting that salvation by grace means that none of us is saved by being “better” or more deserving than others. We welcome the gift and we share it.
Nevertheless, that people sometimes offer religious truth claims in inappropriate ways does not discredit all truth claims. Even if opinions once differed, it made a difference whether smoking was really bad for one’s health or not (it is). Although most religious claims are not verified in the same epistemic manner as verdicts on smoking, those who presume that all religious claims are subjective without examining evidence risk staking on this assumption something much more serious than the longevity of their lungs. Simply because there are different opinions does not mean that none of these opinions can be true. Further, whether or not one agrees that a claim about truth is true, one can still speak charitably about it rather than attributing it to bigotry!
Most faiths make truth claims. At some point these truth claims may contradict each other. For example, a central claim of Christians is that Jesus is God’s Son; an important claim of Islam is that God has no son. (This particular difference may be qualified, in that Islam means especially that God did not impregnate Mary, and Christians actually agree with Muslims on this point. Both Islamic and Christian Scriptures affirm the virgin birth.) More obviously, some faiths claim many deities; others claim only one God (though often allowing for other spirits); atheists claim no deity at all. Such claims do not readily harmonize.
Some truth claims among religions admittedly overlap. Apart from reflecting gender values of its day and some comments about ancestor veneration, much early Confucian teaching is common wisdom widely agreeable to other faiths. Further, the monotheistic religions obviously share much in common; Islam, for example, perpetuated many ethical principles insisted on in Judaism and Christianity (and in some points, such as rejecting the veneration of images, may have acted more consistently than some Christians of that era). Likewise, the Christian faith emerged as a form of Judaism. Many of us today appreciate Messianic Judaism’s argument that there remains enough overlap for a Jewish person to follow Jesus without renouncing her or his Jewish heritage.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that most faiths believe that they teach something more true and more helpful than other faiths; that is why they are distinctive faiths. Even here, however, it is possible to treat one’s core beliefs as true without despising other beliefs.
But what about the belief that it is bigoted for any faith (or a particular faith) to claim to be more true than others? If one believes that no belief is more true than any others, one thereby asserts a belief that holds untrue most other beliefs—since most other beliefs are beliefs because their believers hold them to be true. Moreover, believing that no belief can be uniquely true is logically self-defeating, because one cannot affirm that one’s own belief about other beliefs is uniquely true! Despite the logical inconsistency, a belief that other beliefs are not uniquely true is not necessarily bigoted; it just cannot be dogmatic that it is correct.
By contrast, it is worse than merely illogical to call bigoted any belief system that holds itself uniquely true. Such a claim is itself dogmatic, assuming the unique right to evaluate all other beliefs. It is also the one and only belief system that, by its own criteria, should call itself bigoted. One wonders why those who point the finger at Christians or others as bigoted for their beliefs cannot see how their own pointing leaves their other fingers pointing back at themselves.
Gospel truth—Luke 1:1-4
When I have shared the gospel with people, some of them have asked how we can really know much about Jesus. Because I was an atheist before my conversion to Christianity, these are questions I once struggled with myself. Yet the most traditional answers are sometimes the best ones.
Some voices today have come up with more novel answers, such as the DaVinci Code—which is just a novel. Others appeal to the Gospel of Judas, but it comes from the late second-century, perhaps a century and a half after Jesus lived, and few scholars find much authentic historical memory of Jesus in it. Perhaps most shocking is the alleged “Secret Gospel of Mark,” a work supposedly discovered in the twentieth century, alleged to be based on an original from the late second century. Many recent scholars have argued that this work is a twentieth-century forgery. Those who depend on later “Gospels,” from the second century to the twentieth century, often neglect the most obvious and substantial sources about Jesus: the Gospels in our Bible.
Granted, these Gospels were written by Christians—but we learn the most about ancient sages from the circles most likely to preserve information about them, namely their followers. That is true about Socrates, Jesus, and most ancient rabbis (or in other parts of the world and eras, about Buddha or Muhammad).
These Gospels also should be taken at least as seriously as other biographies from antiquity (which often treated philosophers, politicians and generals). Biographers claimed to write mostly accurate works, especially when writing about characters of the recent past, as the Gospels were. In fact, very few ancient biographies were written as close to the time of their subjects as the Gospels were; historians often depend, for example, on Arrian’s centuries-later biography of Alexander, but the Gospels range from just one to two generations after Jesus’s public ministry. (Both used earlier sources, but the Gospels were written within living memory of some eyewitnesses. The Gospels differ from modern biographies, but most scholars today recognize that they fit ancient biographies.)
When Luke wrote his Gospel, probably shortly over a generation after Jesus’ ministry, written accounts about Jesus were proliferating. Luke tells us that “many” had written about Jesus (Luke 1:1). Most of these sources have been unfortunately lost (the surviving, so-called “lost gospels”—both gnostic and apocryphal—are significantly later). Nevertheless, one of Luke’s main sources, the Gospel of Mark, remains, and many scholars reconstruct much of another source based on where Matthew and Luke overlap. We can often compare these sources and see how Luke used them.
Moreover, Luke had oral traditions going back to eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2). Because ancient education at all levels and throughout the Mediterranean involved considerable memorization, we would expect eyewitnesses to have preserved much information about Jesus, more than enough to fill a gospel. In fact, a primary role of disciples in this period was to learn and propagate their teachers’ messages; even disciples who came to disagree with their teachers were expected to accurately report their views. This was true whether the schools emphasized written instruction (for the highly educated) or merely oral memorization. (Completely illiterate bards, in fact, wandered around repeating from memory such works as all of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.) To act as if Jesus’ disciples would have forgotten and replaced his teachings is to make them completely unlike other disciples in antiquity.
It is thus not those who privilege the Gospels as sources of information about Jesus who treat them differently than other comparable ancient works, but those who neglect the Gospels as such sources. We should keep in mind that some written sources were already emerging during a generation when Jesus’ closest eyewitness followers remained in positions of leadership in the church (cf. Gal 1:18-19; 2:9). These sources are much closer in time to the events they narrate than were most ancient biographies.
Moreover, Luke assures Theophilus that he has “thorough knowledge” of the events that he narrates (Luke 1:3). How would he have acquired this? Although the matter is disputed, many scholars interpret the “we” in some passages in Luke’s second volume, Acts, in the most obvious sense: that Luke traveled with Paul. (This was the normal sense in ancient historical works; I argue for this at greater length in my Acts commentary.) If this is correct, Luke stayed in Judea for up to two years, and would have had plenty of opportunity to talk with eyewitnesses and those who knew them (Acts 21:15; 24:27; 27:1). The next best thing to us going and consulting the eyewitnesses today is depending on a writer from that era who did just that.
Luke also writes to confirm accounts that Theophilus had already heard (Luke 1:4). Normally one does not fabricate a lie and then appeal to one’s audience’s knowledge that it is true. Rather, Luke is confirming accounts that already, some time in the church’s second generation, were widely known.
That is partly why so many narratives in the Gospels overlap, rather than telling completely different stories. It is also why these accounts do not directly address some pressing issues of later generations, such as whether Gentiles should be circumcised. The Gospel writers were preaching, using Jesus as their text, but they did not depart far from their text.
They were not simply writing sermons or epistles, but biographies; ancient biographers freely communicated lessons through their biographies, but they chose to draw lessons based on the information they had, rather than making up their illustrations. (Even speeches often drew their illustrations from historical events, the sort recorded in histories and biographies.) Novels (which flourished more in the later period of the apocryphal gospels) were usually romances and were usually interested only in entertainment, not in historical information or (usually) even moral lessons.
Luke’s historical preface invites us to confidence in what the Gospels teach us about Jesus.
Craig S. Keener is author of The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2009).
Christmas vs. the emperor–Matthew 2 and Luke 2
In many circles, editorials and sermons on the true meaning of Christmas have become a routine, perhaps almost obligatory, protest against the materialism and rush of the season. Christmas, of course, has taken on various expressions in a range of cultures through history, along the way picking up fir trees, wrapped gifts, and developing permutations of figures such as St. Nicholas of Myra (a fourth-century bishop).
Most customs we associate with Christmas did not exist in the first century, but two books that are now in the New Testament describe the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s birth. The circumstances in the first, Matthew’s Gospel, portend Jesus’s future conflicts with hostile members of the elite. Although welcomed by outsiders, Joseph, Mary and Jesus have to flee from Bethlehem to Egypt to escape the wrath of the jealous tyrant Herod the Great. My wife, who was a refugee, readily identifies with their plight as refugees (although gifts from the Magi and the large Jewish community in Alexandria should have provided Jesus’s family a measure of comfort).
Back in Bethlehem, however, Matthew’s scene immediately develops into one of terror. Herod, king of Judea, massacres the male infants remaining in Bethlehem. Three times the narrative lists the objects that have threatened the mad king’s rage: “the baby and his mother.” Whatever Matthew’s sources for this account, his portrayal fits the recorded character of a king who murdered three of his sons, his favorite wife, and anyone he saw as a potential threat to his throne. His young brother-in-law, for example, a high priest who was becoming too popular, had a drowning “accident” in a pool that archaeologists suggest was only three feet deep.
See the rest of this story at the following link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-s-keener/christmas-vs-the-empire_b_4404833.html; also available at http://www.evangelicalsforsocialaction.org/christmas-vs-the-empire/
MacArthur’s Strange Fire
[Note: As a rule, Dr. Keener does not review books on this site (even his own). The site also does not usually address the sorts of issues addressed here. Nevertheless, Dr Keener is making a single exception in this case due to the very public nature of the challenge.]
While offering some very needed points, John MacArthur’s Strange Fire unfortunately extrapolates from those points to an entire “movement.” As I note below, I also believe that MacArthur suppresses some biblical truth on the basis of a postbiblical doctrine, the very offense with which he charges others.
Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from his criticisms; he has brought again to our attention some serious errors that charismatic churches must be on their guard against. I start with some agreeable points in the book and then move to points where I believe MacArthur has clearly overstepped the bounds of reason and Christian civility; there my tone cannot be as conciliatory. (All pagination in this review refers to the uncorrected page proofs that I received shortly before the book’s publication.)
Read the rest of the review at:
http://pneumareview.com/john-macarthurs-strange-fire-reviewed-by-craig-s-keener/
Paul’s Asian mission to Europe—Acts 16:9
The first missionaries were not Europeans, but were from a part of Asia just a few days’ walk north of Africa. Yet even at an early time, they brought their message to Europe.
When God gave Paul a dream of a Macedonian inviting him to Macedonia (Acts 16:9), Paul and his companions set sail for Macedonia and began the first recorded missionary successes Paul had experienced since he parted ways with Barnabas. Yet there is a possible geographic significance of this journey that we might miss.
Paul was in Alexandria Troas when he had this vision, and Greeks and Romans typically associated this large city with nearby Troy. Greeks had long considered Troy the entry point for Greek invasions of Asia. In Greeks’ most prominent epic story, the Greeks warred against Troy. Centuries later, the Macedonian prince Alexander the Great claimed to repeat the earlier Greek conquests when he invaded the Persian empire—starting at Troy.
Troy was on the northeast coast of Asia Minor, and Greek and Roman sources regularly treated it as a major boundary point between “Europe” (their own continent) and “Asia.” These boundaries had always been arbitrary—early Greeks had defined everything to their east as Asia, and to their south as Africa, and themselves as Europe. By this period, Greek and Asian culture had interacted with each other for centuries.
Paul’s movement into Europe from Troas might strike many first-century readers as significant. By Greek and Roman standards, Paul and his companions were Asian, and preached an Asian religion (Judea and Galilee were part of the Roman province of Syria in the continent of Asia).
Greeks and Romans sometimes boasted that they were conquerors of Asia, although by this they could mean only part of Asia. (Rome’s most serious military challenge long remained the Parthian empire, which controlled regions now including Iran. Beyond Iran, Rome merely had trade ties, for example with India, Vietnam and China.) Yet now Asian representatives of a universal, but initially Afroasiatic, faith were moving in the reverse direction. Yet these messengers did not go simply as colonialists in reverse. In this case, they brought not violent conquest but good news about God’s universal, transforming kingdom.
Since that time the message about Jesus has spread among many nations. In the first few centuries, north Africa and what is now Turkey were the places where Christianity was strongest; later it spread elsewhere, sometimes diminishing in areas where it was once strong. The east African empire of Axum, in what is now Ethiopia, converted to Christianity in the early fourth century, and has remained predominantly Christian since that time; Syrian Christians evangelized further east, including parts of India. Later, for a period of time, the west was a dominant center of Christianity, but all scholars now agree that Christianity is stronger and growing much faster in Africa, Latin America and much of Asia.
It has never been correct to view Christianity as a “western” religion. Geographically, it originated in what Europeans called Asia, not far from what Europeans defined as Africa. Yet from the beginning, God intended it not only for Israel, not only for Asia, not only for the Mediterranean Roman empire. From the beginning God intended a people for his name from among all the nations. God who created all peoples also sent his Son to redeem members of all peoples. Paul’s dream in Macedonia was just one reminder of this: “Come over into Macedonia and help us.” God loves all peoples. If we love him, we must also love and serve all peoples.
Craig Keener is author of 17 books, including the IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament and a four-volume commentary on Acts, as well as coauthor with Glenn Usry of Black Man’s Religion.
The down payment—2 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5; Ephesians 1:13-14
Did you know that we have already begun to taste the future world? We are visitors in this age; our true home is in the age to come. That does not mean that we should be irrelevant to this age; rather, it means that we should be all the more relevant, but the substance of our relevance is not following the fads, fashions and whims of our culture. Rather, we shed the light of God’s kingdom, with its transforming vision of justice, peace and righteousness, in a world that has forgotten the only true and transcendent source of hope.
Hebrews 6:5 says that those who believe in Christ “have tasted of the powers of the age to come.” Likewise, Paul declares that Christ delivered us from (literally) “this present evil age” (Gal 1:4). He also warns us not to be “conformed to this age, but be transformed by your mind being made new” (Rom 12:2). These writers were simply following what Jesus had already revealed. “If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God,” Jesus announced, “then God’s kingdom has come upon you” (Matt 12:28).
Jesus’s contemporaries were expecting the messianic king and future kingdom to come soon; they were expecting the dead to be raised and that God would pour out his Spirit. But the king, Jesus, who is yet to come, has already come the first time. Although we still await the resurrection of our bodies, Jesus has already been raised from the dead in history. And since the day of Pentecost God has been pouring out the Spirit. In the language of many scholars, the kingdom is “already/not yet”: the consummation remains future, but we are already living with some of the benefits of that future kingdom.
This future reality invades our lives by the Spirit. The Spirit is promised for the future age, but through him we can taste God’s presence and power in our lives in the present. That is why Paul speaks of the Spirit as the “down payment” of our future inheritance (2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:13-14). The Greek word sometimes rendered “down payment” here was used in ancient business documents for the first installment: no mere verbal guarantee, it is the beginning experience of what is promised. By experiencing the Spirit, we are experiencing a foretaste of the glories of the coming world in God’s presence.
That is why Paul wrote, “The things that eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor have occurred to the human heart—(so it is with) the things that God has prepared for those who love him. But God has revealed them to us by the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:9-10). Because the Spirit is intimate with God the Father’s heart, Paul explains, we can know God’s heart for us (2:10-16). Through the Spirit, we have a foretaste of the beautiful intimacy that we will share with God through all the ages of eternity.
We belong to a future age; let us not forget that crucial feature of our identity. The world around ought to be able to look at the church and see a foretaste of what heaven will be like. If they cannot, it is because we are living short of our birthright in Christ. May we dare to believe what God declares about our identity in Christ, as partakers of a new creation that began when Jesus rose from the dead.
Craig is professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary; he is author of The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament.
In God’s presence—John 14—16
Some of us feel that we have to earn our way into God’s presence when we pray—that somehow if we pray a certain way or for a particular length of time, God will start hearing us. Some even think that we lack access to God’s presence until Jesus’s return. When Jesus sent his disciples to the world, however, he equipped them with his Spirit (John 20:21-23). This is the same Spirit he had explained to them earlier, who would continue Jesus’ presence among them (John 14:2-23) and in the world (16:7-11).
Jesus begins hinting at this even before he becomes fully explicit. We typically quote John 14:2-3 as if it referred only to Jesus’ future coming: “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places … I will come again and take you to myself.” But as wonderful as our future hope is, Jesus intended something more than this here. The Father’s house is the place in his presence, and we do not belong to it only in the future. The only “coming” Jesus explicitly refers to in this context is his return to them after the resurrection to give them his Spirit (14:16-19, 23), a promise fulfilled in 20:19-23. The Greek term for “dwelling places” in 14:2 occurs in only one other text in the Bible—later in this very conversation (14:23), where Jesus and the Father will make their “dwelling place” within the believer.
If such an understanding seems difficult to us, we should remember that it was no less difficult for the first disciples. Jesus promised to prepare them a place in the Father’s presence, where he was going (14:2-4), but they protested that they knew neither where he was going nor how to get there (14:5). Jesus replied that where he was going was to the Father, and they would get there by coming through him (14:6). Today we understand that we do not have to wait for Jesus’ future return to come to the Father through Jesus; we come to him by faith when we accept him as our Lord and Savior.
In other words, we enter the Father’s presence at the moment of our conversion. Whether or not one recognizes that 14:2-3 speak of present experience, certainly 14:17 and 23 do: the Father, Son and Spirit come to make their dwelling place in believers. This means that, if you have surrendered your life to Jesus, you are in his presence this very moment. The same Jesus who taught and healed in Galilee, who washed his disciples’ feet, who died for our sins and rose from the dead, is with you right now as you are reading this article. He is with you every moment of every day, living inside you and eager to teach you his ways.
But the Spirit not only mediates Jesus’ presence to us; the Spirit also mediates Jesus’ presence to the world. Just as Jesus convicted the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment during his earthly ministry, the Spirit will continue to do so by presenting Jesus to the world (John 16:8-11). But the text also suggests that the Spirit will work especially through Jesus’ followers even to mediate Jesus’ presence to the world (15:26-27). Jesus promised to send the Spirit not to the world, but to believers (16:7); through our testimony of Jesus the Spirit would convict the world by confronting them with the presence of Jesus himself (16:8-11). Because Jesus lives inside us, we can be confident that when we live his ways and share his message, God himself will touch the hearts of the people we share with.
This is adapted from an article Craig wrote in 2004; Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).
Knowing the Shepherd—John 9—10
Today as we seek to walk intimately with our Lord, we can remember an occasion in the Gospel of John where Jesus talked about knowing him. Although Jesus addressed one situation, the principles in John 9—10 apply to believers in all cultures.
When Jesus heals a man from blindness on a mandatory day of rest, some religious leaders expel the man from their community for following Jesus. Jesus then confronts these leaders in John 9:40—10:18, explaining that those who were truly Jesus’s sheep—like this formerly blind man—hear his voice. By contrast, those who try to lord it over the sheep however they see fit—like these religious leaders—are like thieves, robbers or wolves, who come to devour the sheep (John 10:1, 5, 8, 10, 12). Jesus is the good shepherd, who will lay down his life for the sheep to protect them from the robbers and wolves (10:11).
Hearers who knew the Bible well should have understood what Jesus was implying here. In Israel’s Scriptures, God is the chief shepherd, and his people Israel are his sheep; ungodly leaders who exploit the sheep would stand under God’s judgment (Ezek 34; Jer 23:1-4). It does not matter whether the religious leaders have kicked the healed man out of their religious community. The rightful shepherd declares that the healed man belongs to his sheep, i.e., is one of his people! Most scholars today believe that many members of John’s own audience had been kicked out of their religious communities for following Jesus. John recounts these earlier events about Jesus to encourage his audience that what matters is not the approval of people but the approval of the Lord himself.
The religious leaders, sure of their learning and piety, reject the faith of the man they think had been “born in sin” (John 9:34). By meeting Jesus, however, the blind man enters a relationship much more important than any of the elite members of his people could have offered him. Jesus insists that his own sheep will follow him because they know his voice, the way sheep normally follow only their own shepherds (John 10:3-4); they will not follow the voice of strangers (10:5).
Then Jesus offers an extraordinary claim: his own sheep know him “just as” he and the Father know each other (10:14-15). The same kind of intimacy that the Father has with the Son is the kind of intimacy Jesus wants us to have with him. (John illustrates this elsewhere; for example, the same Greek term is used for Jesus’ intimate position with his Father in 1:18 and for the beloved disciple’s intimate position with Jesus in the banquet in 13:23.)
Jesus was intimate with his disciples. In ancient literature, someone who shared the deepest confidences of his or her heart was a true friend; Jesus shared with his disciples whatever he heard from his Father (John 15:15). But this relationship did not vanish when Jesus ascended to the Father; he promised the Spirit, so that whatever the Spirit hears from Jesus, he will continue to make known to us (John 16:13-15). This means that we can be just as intimate with Jesus as, and experience his presence no less fully than, the disciples he walked with 2000 years ago. When we embrace Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we begin a new life of relationship with him.
Like the formerly blind man, we have entered into a relationship that matters more than what anyone else thinks of us. We may be lowly or despised in the eyes of others. But in prayer and a life of faith, led by God’s Spirit, we commune with the king of all kings. His sheep still know his voice, and we continue growing to know his voice better through studying Scripture and walking daily with him.
Perhaps thirty-five years ago, soon after my conversion from atheism, I had an unexpected experience. Reading my Bible day after day, I longed to hear God like the people in the Bible did, but I did not know that it was possible. One day the longing was so intense, and yet the Spirit sparked faith in my heart to trust God to open my ears to hear his voice. What I heard was the deepest love and kindness I had ever experienced, a love that I had never before known, a love that I yearned to reciprocate by devoting myself wholly to God’s will. Each day I was eager to spend more time learning his heart. I have not heard God as clearly in every season of my life as I did in seasons like that one, but he is eager to share his heart with us. Jesus touched me, as he touched the blind man in John 9. May we all cry out to the Savior to open our ears to hear his precious heart more and more!
Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).